Military discipline

Getting away with it

Tougher sentences for some soldiers, but not for others

ON JANUARY 25th a soldier in the 101st Airborne Division was sentenced to 18 years in prison. He had pleaded guilty to murdering an Iraqi detainee and taking part in the killing of two others during a raid on the Muthana chemical complex last May. A fortnight earlier, another soldier involved in the same incident had been handed an 18-year sentence after pleading guilty. In November James Barker, also from the 101st Airborne Division, was sentenced to 90 years' imprisonment after pleading guilty to the rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl, followed by the murder of her parents and a younger sibling, in the village of Mahmudiya, south of Baghdad, last March. Three other soldiers from the 101st division are awaiting trial on the same charges.

Are the military authorities becoming less tolerant of soldiers' bad behaviour abroad? Yes and no. Apart from Corporal Charles Graner, sentenced in January 2005 to ten years' imprisonment for his lead role in the Abu Ghraib scandal, almost no other American found guilty of the murder or abuse of Iraqi and Afghan civilians or detainees has received more than a couple of years in prison. Most have been demoted, had their pay docked, or simply been reprimanded.

Only last week, two Special Forces soldiers received reprimands after being cleared of wrongdoing in the deaths of two detainees at an American army base in Afghanistan in March 2003. Jamal Naseer, an 18-year-old Afghan army recruit, died after interrogation at the base; Wakil Mohammed, a woodcutter, died in American custody after being shot in the face during a search. Army investigators said the soldiers had shot him in self-defence.

Seven marines and a navy corpsman were charged with the unprovoked murder in April 2006 of an unarmed Iraqi civilian in Hamdania, a Sunni village west of Baghdad. Three have been given prison sentences of 12-21 months after pleading guilty to the lesser charge of aggravated assault; a fourth is awaiting sentence after pleading guilty to premeditated murder last month. The soldiers are alleged to have dragged the disabled 52-year-old man from his home, bound and gagged him, and shot him at point-blank range. They then made it look as if they had killed him in an exchange of gunfire as he was digging a hole for a roadside bomb.

Five months earlier, in one of the worst atrocities to come out of the Iraq war, 24 civilians, including women and children, were shot by American troops in the farming town of Haditha in apparent revenge for the killing of one of their squad by a roadside bomb. The marines claimed at first that most of the victims had been killed in the bomb blast and the rest as they tried to flee. Eight are awaiting trial after being charged in December.

So incensed was Nuri al-Maliki, Iraq's prime minister, by such atrocities that he called last July for a review of the law that gives immunity from prosecution to American troops. “Those who are free from being punished misbehave and they have misbehaved a lot,” he said. “The crimes in all these places [Abu Ghraib, Mahmudiya, Haditha and Hamdania] stink,” he added.

America has always insisted that it will carry out its own investigations and prosecutions into “credible” allegations of murder and serious maiming or abuse of innocent civilians. And in many cases, to its credit, it has done so. But until last July there was no requirement for officers to conduct such investigations.

According to American civil-liberties groups such as Human Rights First and Human Rights Watch, only about half the hundreds of allegations against American troops and personnel have been adequately investigated. The groups claim to have documented more than 330 credible cases of torture, killings and abuse of some 460 detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay. But of the 600 or so American soldiers and officials they say are implicated, only a tiny fraction—40 at the time of their report last April—had been given custodial sentences.